Hi all,
This talk might have been seen by some of you; but was certainly new to me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lCSDOuqv1A&feature=autoshare
Much of this is an exploration of how google is making use of freebase's
underlying linked data to better understand what they are crawling -
deriving what something is by examining its attributes; and automatically
creating something like linked data from it.
Additionally; it talks about Google squared - this tool appears to be
heavily powered by freebase data; as well as derived data from the web. I
was fairly impressed by the mix of understanding a user query and rendering
results as actual entities (one of the few non-facet based UIs I have seen).
For instance: "territorial authorities in new zealand"
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=territorial+authorities+in+new+zealand
Whilst this is not using the typical linked data technology stack of RDF,
SPARQL, open licenced data, etc; it certainly shows you what can be done
with data in a graph structure; plus a UI which is a cross between a
spreadsheet and a search result.